The Michigan Appropriateness Guide for Intravenous Catheters (MAGIC) is a new resource designed to help clinicians select the safest and most appropriate peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) for individual patients.

“How do you decide which catheter is best for your patient? Until now there wasn’t a guide bringing together all of the best available evidence,” says the guide’s lead author Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc, FHM, a hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“These are among the most commonly performed procedures on any hospitalized patient, and yet, the least studied,” he adds. “We as hospitalists are the physicians who order most of these devices, especially PICCs.”

The guide includes algorithms and color-coded pocket cards to help physicians determine which PICC to choose. The cards can be freely downloaded and printed from the Improve PICC website at the University of Michigan.

The project to develop the guide brought together 15 leading international experts on catheters and their infections and complications, including the authors of existing guidelines, to brainstorm more than 600 clinical scenarios and best evidence-based practice for catheter use using the Rand/UCLA Appropriateness Method. “We also had a patient on the panel, which was important to the clinicians because this patient had actually used many of the devices being discussed,” Dr. Chopra explains.

The guidelines “have the potential to change the game for hospitalists,” Dr. Chopra adds. “There has never before been guidance on using IV devices in hospitalized medical patients, despite the fact that we use these devices every day. Now, for the first time, we not only have guidance but also a tool to benchmark the quality of care provided by doctors when it comes to venous access.”